Around the world, heaps of school children are starting a brand new school year. And in some locations, that means learning cursive this year. But why was cursive ever a thing and what does its future look like? That's what we're talking about today on the case of cursive with Hello from the Van. Thanks to typewriters, computers, iPads, and now artificial intelligence, the previous requirement of penmanship has largely been dropped from most school systems around the world. It is rare in society that we stop actively teaching the faster way of doing something in exchange for the slower way of doing something or not doing that thing at all. And yet, here we are. But why? Let's break it down. To start, what is cursive? Cursive is writing in a manner that connects each letter of character together, thus removing the need to lift your pen between each letter. By not lifting your pen, you save time, energy, and money on ink. In short, it's a type of penmanship and writing. And in the cursive world, there are actually different types of cursive, subtypes, if you will. Basically, there's different evolutions of writing, like Pokemon. First of all, there's this thing called ligature. It's just connecting the individual letters in a word. Lots of people naturally do this. Kids do this as they learn to write. This is the base model of writing and cursive. It's simply connecting letters willy-nilly. There are no rules to ligature. We all do it sometimes, and we all do it in different ways. To stick with our Pokemon example, this is the OG Charmander of writing. It's the almost natural form of trying to write quickly. It's basically writing fast and naturally squishing your letters together so they connect. Next, we have italic cursive. This is different from the regular cursive that you might think of. This is the super old-timey writing that you see written on books from the Renaissance. In this type of cursive, not all of the letters are connected. This is a very distinct type of writing. It also has rules to it, where ligature does not. This type of writing comes not only from a time when writing was limited to the educated, but when great care was taken to make things look aesthetic and beautiful as well. Italic cursive is like Charmander becoming Charmelian. It's a step up from what everyone naturally does, and it's prized for its beauty and usefulness. And finally, we have looped cursive. This is what the general population commonly refer to when they're talking about cursive. In this style of cursive, the letters are formed differently than regular block writing or type. Each letter has its own style and pattern and rules, different things for different letters. Also, the uppercase and lowercase letters are usually distinct from each other. Basically, it's cursive that takes effort and training. It has standardized rules. This is the Charizard of writing. Its final evolution and most powerful form. This is where signatures, historical documents, and letters from your grandma come from. Looped cursive is the style of cursive used for things like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. This is also the type of cursive that used to be taught in elementary schools across the United States. Cursive has actually been around in one form or another for thousands of years. There is a belief among historians that it started with the Romans, but in my personal opinion, cursive feels like one of those things that naturally happened as soon as humans started writing things down with ink. Why do I think that? Well, because some form of cursive exists in almost every written language. German, Greek, Marathi, Russian, even Japanese and Chinese, which use characters up and down a page rather than letters across a page, have cursive versions of their characters. For the whole of time, humans have been trying to save time. Is it economizing or is it laziness? Meh, I don't know. Probably a little bit of both. You see, in my opinion, this is because just about everyone is looking for faster ways of doing things. No one wants to waste time or risk getting a hand cramp due to writing too much. But why do we normally learn block letters first and cursive is seen as optional? Why not cut out the redundancy and learn the faster way of writing first? The answer is technology. As the advent of typewriters and computers came around in the mid to late 1900s, cursive fell out of fashion. Why learn cursive when you can just type? This has gone almost to an extreme in our day as phones, tablets, and artificial intelligence have begun to dominate education. Some countries, like Finland, have largely dropped any penmanship teaching in their school systems. They are almost 100% taught digitally, and the skill of handwriting in any form is viewed as archaic and unneeded. Not just cursive, any penmanship. Well, about that. When it comes to education and the learning of cursive, there has been almost a war on cursive for about a hundred years, and it's not just driven by the march of technology. German cursive was outlawed by the Nazis in the 1900s. The belief was that if Germans could not read their documents, they could be more easily controlled. That argument is still heard today, although it's framed differently. Some educators worry that cursive is a look into the past and the window is closing. With each generation that does not develop the ability to write, pieces of history are left behind. Important documents, ship records like those used in our episode last week, journals, etc., are all written in cursive. It was the standard way of writing, saved time, and got work done faster for hundreds of years. These documents, written in cursive, are the foundations for laws, nations, families, and personal histories. Another interesting aspect of learning to write and cursive is the centuries-old requirement of a signature. Much like Ariel signing a contract with Ursula, at some point, all of us real life humans need to have a signature. It used to be that cursive was the gateway to your signature. Look at any document that predates the 2000s and they have physical signatures. Your name and signature used to mean something. It used to be individual and personalized for you. And I think maybe it still does. But how do you write a signature unless you've learned your options for how to write your name? I remember as a kid, a lot of people used to practice writing their names on papers. You would see someone write their name over and over and over again to pass the time. Everyone wanted a really cool signature. I remember one teacher in junior high pulling up the Declaration of Independence, having us look at each of the signatures, and describe who we thought may have written that signature. The teacher then asked us to think about our own signature and what it would represent about us. But how does that transfer to the age of technology? Everyone still may want a cool-looking signature, but in the age of technology and e-signatures, does it matter? Well, that's up to you to decide. One educator, Maria Montessori, argued that writing with straight lines is more difficult than writing with curved lines, and children would benefit from learning cursive first. Her position had nothing to do with signatures and technology, but everything to do with the way that the brain works. To that effect, studies have shown that students with dyslexia, who have difficulty learning to read because their brains can't really associate sound and letter combinations sometimes, have found that cursive can help them with the decoding process because it integrates hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills, and other brain and memory functions. It's interesting. Sometimes the thing we think that will make us superhumanly fast, like computers and AI, can also be the thing that slows us down. With each new technology, there comes a learning curve. There was a fascinating article in Psychology Today all about cursive and the skill of handwriting. In 2020, so just a couple years ago, a study found that even if students used digital pens and wrote by hand on an interactive computer screen, cursive handwriting still helped their brain learn and remember better. Neuroscientists also studied the effect of handwriting, any handwriting, not just cursive, on children's brains in the early 2010s, and they found amazing things. Karen James and Lauren Engelhard found that handwriting, but not typing or tracing letter shapes, activated a unique reading circuit in the brain. Quote, these findings demonstrate that handwriting is important for the early recruitment of brain regions known to underlie successful reading, close quote. Their findings have now been backed by further research by other scientists in the years since. This is all well and good science and memory, but how does that affect us? As a kid, I loved the PBS show Wishbone. It's about a Jack Russell Terrier who covers classic literature. It sounds obscure, but trust me, 10 out of 10 recommend. In Wishbone, season 1, episode 23, Wishbone is giving a fantastic doggy retelling of the HG Wells book, The Time Machine. And in that book, the character naturally gets in a time machine and goes to the future. There, people of the future cannot read or write. They entertain themselves and can barely speak. I remember as a kid being shocked by this. Even the talking dog in the show was shocked by it. How could ignorance be the future? Well, that future is starting to happen now. Researchers have found that not learning to write by hand directly affects language acquisition. Quote, given the technological development of the last several years, we risk having one or more generations lose the ability to write by hand, close quote. So this isn't my opinion. This isn't the opinion of a talking dog on a PBS show from the 90s. This is science. And sometimes the writing isn't just about language acquisition, it's about so much more. Memory and brain activity are affected by learning to write as well. Quote, the use of pen and paper gives the brain more hooks to hang your memories on, close quote. Basically, the physical act of learning to write paves the road for your mind and memories to drive on. Something that does not happen when you simply click on a tablet or a computer screen. Researchers are currently studying the effects of digital learning, and we are watching a major shift in humanity and education happen. Will we see a resurgence of learning to write by hand? Or will cursive become a lost art? It will be interesting to see what turns out. And with that, I'm Mimi Fotz, and this has been The Case of Cursive with Hello from the Band.